Despite the world suffering from a global shortage of semiconductors, the demand for various end devices has seen a sizeable surge in recent times. This has caused various tech giants to increase their component procurement efforts, which has led to foundries seeing record high revenues, with TSMC seeing a steady rise in revenue thanks to high demand for its 7nm process from AMD, Qualcomm, and MediaTek.
According to a TrendForce report (via BusinessWire), the top 10 foundries across the globe registered record high revenue in the first quarter of this year. This was enabled by the price hike for semiconductors since foundries are facing tight production capacities for semiconductors at the moment. These top 10 foundries accounted for 22.75 billion US Dollars in revenue in Q1 2021, with TSMC taking the lead.
The world’s largest contract chipmaker alone recorded 12.9 billion US Dollars in revenue in the first quarter alone. This was enabled due to high demand for its 7nm, 12nm, and even 16nm process node. Fabless chipmakers like AMD, Qualcomm, and MediaTek were a major part of the record high revenue as their orders remained consistent despite the price hike. TSMC saw a 23 percent rise quarter on quarter in revenue from the 7nm process in Q1 2021.
This is indicative of the high demand for chips built on the advanced processes as well. But due to the foundry capacity shortages that are expected to continue through the second quarter of this year, the prices of wafers will continue to rise. In other words, the revenue of top foundries is expected to continue to rise. Meanwhile, various governments and chipmakers are looking to invest in expanding chip production sites across the globe to help alleviate the semiconductor shortage issue.
RELATED:
- Samsung flagship Exynos CPU with AMD RDNA2 GPU to launch later this year
- Nvidia announces new GeForce RTX 3080 Ti and RTX 3070 Ti GPUs
- Huawei Matebook D 14 and D15 laptops arrive running on the latest AMD Ryzen 5000 SoCs
